Here's Who Made Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant For Business Intelligence And Analytics Platforms

Business Intelligence Shifting To Business-Led, Self-Service Analytics

Business intelligence has typically been an IT-led function, with the IT department using legacy software to prepare static reports for managers and employees.

There has been a significant shift in recent years, however, with increasing emphasis on providing business users with self-service data preparation and discovery capabilities. That's reduced the dependence on IT and shifted the BI buying decisions -- and the balance of power -- to the business side.

By 2018, Gartner forecasts that "smart, governed, Hadoop-based, search-based and visual-based data discovery will converge in a single form of next-generation data discovery that will include self-service data preparation and natural-language generation."

This shift has reordered the BI vendor landscape. Here's a look at where 24 major business analytics software vendors stand.

Worldwide BI And Analytics To Reach $16.9 Billion

Gartner forecasts that global revenue in the business intelligence and analytics market will grow 5.2 percent this year to reach $16.9 billion.

The market is now in the final stages of a shift from IT-led systems to business-led, self-service analytics. That means a new generation of business intelligence and analytics platform has emerged to meet the new organizational requirements for accessibility, agility and deeper analytical insight, according to Gartner.

"The shift to the modern BI and analytics platform has now reached a tipping point," said Ian Bertram, managing vice president at Gartner, in a report on the business intelligence market. "Organizations must transition to easy-to-use, fast and agile modern BI platforms to create business value from deeper insights into diverse data sources."

"It is no longer possible for chief marketing officers to be experts only in branding and ad placement," Bertram said. "They must also be customer analytics experts. The same is true for the chief HR, supply chain and financial roles in most industries."

BI Magic Quadrant Methodology

Because of the shift toward business-led, self-service business intelligence tools, Gartner has updated the definition of business analytics platforms, including the use cases and critical capabilities used in evaluating vendors and determining their positions in this year's Magic Quadrant. (Note: All 24 vendors landed in the Leaders, Visionaries or Niche Players quadrants with none in the Challengers quadrant.)

Scores are based on customer reference surveys conducted in November 2015. Vendors were assessed for their support for five use cases: agile centralized BI provisioning, decentralized analytics, governed data discovery, embedded BI and extranet deployment.

Vendors were also assessed against 14 critical capabilities in four categories:

Infrastructure: BI platform administration, cloud BI, security and user administration, and data source connectivity

Data management: Governance and metadata management, self-contained ETL and data storage

Analysis and content creation: Embedded advanced analytics, analytics dashboards, interactive visual exploration, and mobile exploration and authoring

Sharing of findings: Embedding analytic content, publishing analytic content, collaboration and social BI

Leader: Microsoft

Microsoft, one of three vendors in the Leader quadrant, was furthest of any company along the "Completeness of Vision" axis. The vendor markets a broad range of on-premise and cloud-based BI and analytics products including the Power BI and the new Power BI Desktop. Power BI provides data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboard tools.

Strengths: Microsoft's cloud-based model and low per-user pricing result in a low total cost of ownership. The Redmond, Wash.-based company wins high scores for user enablement, including online tutorials and documentation. It has continued to expand the number and variety of natively supported data sources. And Microsoft has worked with its partner network to build connectors and content such as prebuilt reports and dashboards, Gartner found.

Cautions: Microsoft scores low on product capabilities for advanced analytics and the average deployment size of 192 users is low. Power BI was rated low for breadth of use, looking at the percentage of users that use the software for a range of BI tasks from viewing reports, to simple ad hoc queries, to complex queries and predictive models.

Leader: Tableau

Tableau joins Microsoft and Qlik in the Leader quadrant, but scored highest on the "Ability to Execute" axis. The company offers "highly interactive and intuitive data discovery products that enable business users to easily access, prepare and analyze their data without the need for coding." Gartner says Tableau has maintained its growth rate "despite increased pressure in 2015 from a growing number of competitors."

Strengths: Tableau, Seattle, continues to execute "better than any vendor in the BI market" and has won many large enterprise deals (average deployment is 1,927) with its land-and-expand sales model. The product's versatility in deployment options, use cases and range of data source connectivity is a core strength. Tableau has built an extensive network of Alliance Partners with implementation expertise.

Cautions: Tableau's support score was below average, possibly a result of the company's rapid growth. Its software was ranked in the bottom third for complex analysis tasks and there are weaknesses in data integration across data sources. Tableau's pricing "is being more heavily scrutinized" and the company could face more competition from "new lower-priced market entrants."

Leader: Qlik

Qlik occupies the leader quadrant with Microsoft and Tableau. The Radnor, Pa.-based company's QlikView and Qlik Sense software, often deployed by line of business, provide data discovery and analytics capabilities.

Strengths: Qlik's software gets high ratings for ease of use, business benefits and complexity of analysis -- the latter higher than rivals Tableau and Microsoft. Rapid implementation capabilities and an in-memory engine for complex data sources and applications boost the product's success. Qlik has a "strong partner network" of more than 1,700 partners, which Gartner called "a key ingredient in ensuring customer success."

Cautions: Qlik Sense uses token-based pricing and 29 percent of reference customers said cost was a barrier to adoption. Gartner said Qlik licensing is competitively priced relative to Tableau, but could be more expensive in larger deployments. Qlik scored slightly below average for customer support, although the recently introduced Proactive Support may remedy that. Qlik Sense "still has some functionality gaps to address."

Visionary: Alteryx

Alteryx markets a workflow-based platform with both data blending capabilities and statistical, predictive and spatial analytical tools for business users. Gartner put Irvine, Calif.-based Alteryx at the top of the visionaries quadrant because of its sales execution, strong customer experience scores and ability to meet the demand for "robust self-service data preparation capabilities." The vendor also has a "partner-centric sales strategy."

Strengths: Alteryx gets high scores for understanding the needs of the business analytics market and its focus on customer experience and satisfaction. The company rated highest among all vendors in the Magic Quadrant for product quality and complexity of analysis. Customers cited Alteryx's functionality, ability to support large volumes of data, and data access and integration capabilities as key reasons for selecting the software.

Cautions: Much of Alteryx's success is attributed to partnerships with data discovery vendors like Tableau, Qlik and Microsoft, rather than market awareness and mind share of Alteryx itself. More than a third of buyers surveyed by Gartner said Alteryx's cost was a barrier to wider deployment.

Visionary: SAS

SAS develops a broad range of business analytics software including prebuilt analytical applications for vertical industries, tools for data scientists, and discovery and dashboard software for mainstream business users -- including the flagship SAS Visual Analytics.

Strengths: SAS, based in Cary, N.C., wins on the strengths of its software technology, scoring high among customers on functionality, performance and ability to scale to large data volumes. The company differentiates itself through its complexity of analysis, advanced visualizations, and advanced analytics capabilities that include forecasting, decision trees and goal seeking.

Cautions: SAS scored low among users for sales experience, including pre- and post-sales and contract negotiations. The company rated in the bottom quartile for operations including technical support and migration experience and was rated low for ease of implementation and administration.

Visionary: SAP

Businesses often choose SAP's business intelligence products, including the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform and Lumira data visualization software, because they have deployed SAP ERP applications and the vendor's enterprise data warehouse software. The Walldorf, Germany-based company launched SAP Cloud for Analytics in late 2015.

Strengths: Functionality and integration with enterprise applications were cited as top reasons for selecting SAP business intelligence products. The vendor received high scores for market understanding and ability to address clients' needs. The company scored highest for governed data discovery use cases: Businesses can balance governance and agility between a central BI platform and decentralized deployments.

Cautions: SAP was rated in the bottom quartile for customer experience with support a "serious concern" and the availability of skilled resources support receiving low scores. The product quality and functionality of the Lumira product need to improve. And only 24 percent of those surveyed actively use SAP in the cloud with another 10 percent planning to do so -- low among the vendors making this Magic Quadrant.

Visionary: MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy's BI platform is more prevalent in enterprise deployments for large-scale system-of-record reporting and governed data discovery. Version 10, released last year, combines self-service data preparation, visual data discovery and big data exploration capabilities.

Strengths: MicroStrategy, Tysons Corner, Va., received the highest product rating of any vendor in the Magic Quadrant with such capabilities as mobile BI and advanced data manipulation. Version 10's native access to Hadoop reduces the need for Hadoop-based discovery tools. The company recently debuted a simplified and public pricing model that's reduced cost as a barrier to broader deployments.

Cautions: Customers rate the MicroStrategy platform as more difficult to use than products like Qlik and Tableau. Scores are low for sales execution and potential customer awareness outside of the installed base -- the company recently reorganized its sales and marketing operations. MicroStrategy is also focused on selling to IT management at a time when business users have a bigger say in BI purchases.

Visionary: IBM

IBM, positioned in the middle of the Visionaries Quadrant, has a portfolio of business intelligence tools including its older Cognos Analytics software and newer cloud-based Watson Analytics product. The latter offers pattern detection, embedded advanced analytics and natural-language query capabilities

Strengths: Watson Analytics, while not as widely deployed as some competitors, is winning kudos from customers for successful pilot projects and delivering "a high level of business benefits." Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM scores high on support for Watson Analytics and the service's subscription-based pricing (and freemium tier) model has made it easy for buyers, boosting IBM's sales execution score.

Cautions: IBM has the lowest average deployment size (43 users versus an overall average of 943) of all vendors in the Magic Quadrant and there are questions about its products' scalability -- perhaps not so surprising given that Watson Analytics is little more than a year old. The product's lack of connectivity to on-premise Cognos could be hindering deployment within IBM's customer base.

Visionary: ClearStory Data

ClearStory Data's cloud- and Spark-based Intelligent Data Harmonization software helps users combine, harmonize and explore (including data analysis and visualization) many large and varied data sets.

Strengths: ClearStory, Menlo Park, Calif., wins on ease of use for business users and on data access and integration. The company's technology enables business users to quickly combine and prepare data for analysis across streaming and batch data sources. The vendor scored in the top quartile for customer experience and on achievement of business benefits.

Cautions: Advanced data manipulation still requires custom calculations. While some customers have purchased large numbers of seats to expand deployments, overall deployment sizes remain small. So far, ClearStory is largely implemented to supplement more widely used platforms to address specific business analysis problems.

Visionary: Logi Analytics

The Logi Analytics platform includes Logi Info, Vision and DataHub. Logi Info is best-known because of its ability to embed analytic content in Websites and applications, making it accessible to a business' customers, partners and suppliers. Logi Vision is a data discovery tool while DataHub is a data preparation and columnar data store.

Strengths: More than 60 percent of the Logi deployments are embedded use cases, highest among all the vendors. Gartner said the McLean, Va.-based company has "a solid vision" for governed data discovery, including the rapid creation of data visualizations in Vision. Logi Vision 2.0 and Logi DataHub 2.0 offered expanded technical capabilities.

Cautions: Logi Analytics scores low for user enablement, meaning the company needs to bolster its user community experience (the company has started local user groups and a customer conference is scheduled for later this year) and establish stronger training programs. Logi's software lacks comprehensive advanced analytics and its cloud offering is "relatively modest," Gartner says.

Visionary: Pentaho

Pentaho, based in Orlando, Fla., was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems in May 2015 and is now a subsidiary of the company. Pentaho is focused on big data projects and the Internet of Things, as well as embedded BI and OEM markets. The company's product lineup includes advanced analytical capabilities through the Data Science Pack and data access and transformation capabilities with Pentaho Data Integration.

Strengths: Pentaho scored high in key areas such as data source connectivity, self-contained ETL, embedded advanced analytics and embedded analytic content. The vendor's technology, for example, can blend and analyze information from SQL repositories, ad hoc files, NoSQL databases and unstructured data.

Cautions: Pentaho was ranked low in customer experience, including user enablement and the availability of skilled resources; for operations, including overall support, product quality and migration experience; and in ease of use, including implementation and administration, content development and end-user consumption.

Visionary: Tibco Software

Tibco acquired Spotfire, an early leader in the data discovery arena, in 2007 and Jaspersoft, a reporting and analytics software developer, in 2014. Other capabilities, including advanced analytics and location intelligence, have been added largely through acquisition. The primary use case is decentralized BI provisioning.

Strengths: Tibco, Palo Alto, Calif., scores well for such critical capabilities as data preparation, advanced analytics and analytical dashboards -- the latter a hallmark of the Spotfire software. Customers adopt Tibco for functionality, data access and integration, and ease of use -- areas where Spotfire was an early leader and continues to be a good product.

Cautions: Tibco has experienced sales execution issues and some potential customers cite high license costs as a barrier to adoption. It receives low scores for user enablement, including training, documentation, user community and customer conferences. The product's ease of use was an area of concern among customers, including implementation and administration, with some saying those issues are a barrier to wider deployment.

Visionary: BeyondCore

BeyondCore develops software that provides "one-click automated business analysis" by combining smart pattern discovery with insights identification. BeyondCore Power offers a full range of analytical capabilities. In April 2015 the company launched BeyondCore Analyst for Office, allowing Microsoft Office users to natively tap into BeyondCore's analytical features.

Strengths: BeyondCore, based in San Mateo, Calif., wins high marks for complexity of analysis, ease of use and implementation cost and effort. The product's primary strength is the "seamless integration of embedded advanced analytic capabilities" that works behind the scenes to find and deliver insights to users.

Cautions: BeyondCore does not yet have "significant market traction," Gartner said, and it's often deployed on a departmental basis -- rarely as the enterprise-standard BI product. The cost of the enterprise software "is considerably higher" than the average cost of other BI and analytical products. The company was ranked lowest among visionaries for "Ability to Execute."

Niche Player: Birst

Birst provides an end-to-end BI platform built on a multitenant cloud architecture that provides a full range of data management and analytic capabilities. Gartner said the vendor has the ability to displace incumbent BI deployments and is positioned as a "next-generation enterprise standard for BI and analytics."

Strengths: Customers cited the appeal of Birst's low total cost of ownership and implementation cost. The software's average deployment (657 users) was in the top 10 percent of all Magic Quadrant vendors. The software is used for a wide range of use cases. And the software received high scores for its infrastructure and data management technology and its concept of networked BI.

Cautions: Birst, San Francisco, was ranked in the bottom quartile for complexity of analysis, meaning it continues to be used largely for less complex reporting and dashboard tasks, despite its more advanced capabilities. Gaps remain in the software's embedded analytics, interactive exploration and collaboration capabilities.

Niche Player: Domo

Domo exited stealth in April 2015 and launched its cloud-based interactive dashboard platform, which is aimed at senior executives and line-of-business users. The company also gained a lot of attention by raising $450 million in venture capital.

Strengths: Domo, American Fork, Utah, is "well-suited for rapid deployment" with an extensive range of prebuilt connectors to cloud-based data sources and applications. Customers selected it for its ease of use for business users and it was among the highest scorers for bringing more insights and analysis to more users.

Cautions: The vendor's cloud-only approach, in that all data must reside in the cloud for analysis, may not suit organizations with primarily on-premise data sources. (The vendor offers a desktop tool for moving on-premise data to the cloud.) Domo's support, rated in the bottom quartile, was cited as one of the biggest limitations to broader deployment.

Niche Player: GoodData

GoodData's comprehensive, multitenant, cloud-only platform is focused on helping enterprises unlock the value of their data by identifying opportunities to generate revenue, improve customer retention or strengthen partnerships. The product includes data integration and data warehouse capabilities, an analytics engine and front-end presentation software.

Strengths: San Francisco-based GoodData received high marks for product quality, support and ease of migration, and above-average grades for user enablement and overall ease of use. While the product traditionally focused on guided analytics, the company has improved its self-service authoring capabilities, including dashboard creation, and improved its data loading capabilities and integrated analytic workflows.

Cautions: Businesses primarily use GoodData for consuming reports and dashboards rather than complex drill-down and predictive analysis tasks. The company has to prove that its "private cloud only" strategy will become a significant differentiator against the public cloud model followed by competitors.

Niche Player: Salesforce

Salesforce entered the BI market in 2014 with its Salesforce Wave Analytics, based on its earlier EdgeSpring acquisition. The cloud software provides analysis, visualization and dashboard capabilities with an initial focus on sales analytics. The platform is natively mobile and integrated with Salesforce Chatter.

Strengths: Customers choose Salesforce Wave Analytics primarily for its cloud deployment and mobile capabilities. San Francisco-based Salesforce has a "robust partner ecosystem" for the product, Gartner said, including ETL and predictive analytics vendors, ISVs and systems integrators. AppExchange provides a platform for ISVs to build and sell add-ons and custom content.

Cautions: Salesforce Wave Analytics is focused on light interactive analytics and lacks certain data discovery features such as advanced data exploration and manipulation for business analysts and self-service data preparation. While Salesforce recently changed its pricing model for the software, customers still cited cost as a barrier to broader deployment.

Niche Player: Board International

Board markets a single, integrated system with BI, analytics and corporate performance management capabilities in a self-contained, in-memory platform. Based in Chiasso, Switzerland, its main market is Europe with a growing emphasis in North America.

Strengths: Board scored well for ease of use for end users and content developers, as well as for functionality. The company continues to invest in its proprietary hybrid in-memory technology to improve system performance, and has enhanced its analytics modeling library for statistical functions and advanced analytical algorithms.

Cautions: Board scored in the bottom quartile for user enablement, particularly for documentation, online tutorials and the lack of a user community. Gartner said customer support must be improved. Board's focus on multidimensional online analytical processing and relational online analytical processing can be limiting for businesses that need to analyze non-tabular, semi-structured or unstructured data.

Niche Player: Information Builders

Information Builders markets its WebFocus BI and analytics platform, including its components App Studio, Business Intelligence Portal, Pro Server and InfoAssist Plus, among others. The vendor is especially focused on large-scale, IT-led deployments.

Strengths: InfoAssist combines visual data discovery, reporting, rapid dashboard creation, interactive publishing, mobile content and the Hyperstage in-memory engine. It can work with the WebFocus server or decoupled from it, demonstrating "a strong vision for governed data discovery." The vendor remains strong in sales execution and pricing.

Cautions: Information Builders' primary use case is information applications designed by IT for operational or customer-facing consumers at a time when self-service BI for line-of-business is catching on. Gartner said New York-based Information Builders' customer scores for business benefits and customer experience "are not as strong as we would expect" given its close relationship with customers.

Niche Player: Sisense

Sisense develops a Web-enabled platform for combining and analyzing multiple, large data sets and sharing the results using dashboards. The New York-based company, with research and development in Israel, has been growing more than 100 percent a year.

Strengths: Customers cite Sisense's ability to support large volumes of data as a key reason for adopting it: It is one of the two top companies in the Magic Quadrant capable of accessing large data volumes in Hadoop's file systems and NoSQL data sources. OEM/embedded BI is the most prominent use case for Sisense, with more than 125 OEM/ISV partners. It also received high marks for customer experience and support.

Cautions: Sisense was ranked low for complexity of analysis and Gartner said there is room for improvement "to enable business analysts to perform more complex analytic workflows." Deployments remain small, with almost 80 percent of implementations having fewer than 100 users.

Niche Player: Pyramid Analytics

Pyramid Analytics, based in Amsterdam, is closely allied with Microsoft, marketing its BI Office software as a front-end enterprise analytics tool that works with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services to provide data ingestion, interactive visualization, analytic dashboards, mobile BI, report publishing and distribution, collaboration and some advanced analytics capabilities.

Strengths: Pyramid scores high for governed data discovery use cases and for ease of use for end users, functionality and overall total cost of ownership. The company's strategic partnership with Microsoft has helped it gain entrance to businesses that use Microsoft SQL Server and Power BI.

Cautions: Pyramid scored low in its complex analysis capabilities and in overall user enablement -- issues it must address to maintain its growth momentum, Gartner said. The company lacks "an extended partner network." And it runs the risk of someday competing with Microsoft Power BI once that product's capabilities expand. It had the lowest Magic Quadrant placement among all vendors for "Completeness of Vision."

Niche Player: Yellowfin

Yellowfin markets a centralized, Web-based BI platform with a number of innovative collaboration features and set of data integration and dashboard tools. It's DashXML component, launched last year, makes it easy to build analytical applications.

Strengths: Customers cited Yellowfin's attractive license costs and simplified licensing policies as reasons for purchasing the software. Yellowfin, Melbourne, Australia, had the second-highest percentage of organizations using its product as their standard enterprise BI system among all vendors in the Magic Quadrant. The company has a strong indirect channel with more than 250 partners worldwide.

Cautions: Customers raised concerns about product quality and support, ranking the vendor in the bottom quartile for both. The company had the second-highest percentage of customers saying they plan to discontinue using the product and scored low for market understanding.

Niche Player: Platfora

Platfora's platform connects to an organization's data lake, including on-premise Hadoop clusters or cloud-based data stores, and pulls the data into an in-memory engine for transformation and analysis -- especially customer, security and IoT analytics.

Strengths: Gartner calls San Mateo, Calif.-based Platfora "the gold standard" for direct Hadoop and Spark support and says a key strength is its ability to work with large data sets: The average underlying Hadoop environment Platfora is working with is 4.7 petabytes in size. The company was ranked in the top third of vendors for complexity of analysis and received solid scores for customer support.

Cautions: Platfora requires a data lake and it's not clear how widely the data lake concept will be adopted. The company is still relatively young and has a small direct sales force, raising questions about its long-term viability and leading to its low "Ability to Execute" ranking in the Magic Quadrant. It also received low scores for overall operations.

Niche Player: Datawatch

Datawatch's technology brings together Monarch's software for analyzing semi-structured content and Panopticon's real-time visualization software. Its product portfolio includes Datawatch Designer (desktop visual data discovery), Datawatch Server (automation and application sharing) and Datawatch Monarch (self-service preparation of multi-structured data).

Strengths: Gartner calls the combination of Datawatch's self-service data preparation and visualization tools "compelling" for business users working to analyze a broader range of data with minimal IT support. The Bedford, Mass.-based vendor scores high for business benefits. And its support for streaming data sources could be a differentiator with the rise of the Internet of Things.

Cautions: Datawatch was at the very bottom of the Magic Quadrant for "Ability to Execute." Surveyed customers ranked the company in the bottom quartile for support, product success and ease of use -- the latter specifically for content development and end-user consumption. It lacks robust cloud deployment capabilities. The company has reported declining license sales and total revenue.

Who's In And Who's Out In This Year's BI/Analytics Magic Quadrant

Because of the shift away from IT-led enterprise reporting to business-led, self-service business intelligence and analytics products, Gartner revised the criteria for inclusion in this year's BI and analytics platform Magic Quadrant. The result is the addition of a number of new companies to the report while a number of vendors that were previously included were dropped.

Added: BeyondCore, ClearStory Data, Domo, Platfora, Salesforce and Sisense.

Dropped: OpenText (Actuate), Oracle, Panorama Software, Prognoz, Salient Management Co. and Targit.

Later this year, Gartner will produce new research that will include vendors in other business intelligence areas including Cloud BI, Hadoop-based discovery, real-time process and operational intelligence, search-based data discovery, link/graph-based data discovery, smart data discovery and natural-language generation, data blending-centric modern BI platforms, and others.